William Johnson Fox (1 March 1786 – 3 June 1864) was an English Unitarian minister, politician, and political orator.
Early life
Fox was born at Uggeshall Farm, Wrentham, near Southwold, Suffolk on 1 March 1786. His parents were strict Calvinists. When he was still young, his father quit farming. After time at a chapel school, Fox became a weaver's boy, an errand-boy, and in 1799, a bank clerk. An autodidact, he entered prize competitions.
From September 1806 Fox trained for the Independent ministry, at Homerton College. His tutor there was John Pye Smith, the Congregational theologian. Early in 1810 he took charge of a congregation at Fareham in Hampshire. Failing to make a small seceding congregation there viable, he left within two years to become minister of the Unitarian chapel at Chichester. The circle included Sophia Dobson Collet, who saw some of Fox's sermons into print; Mary Leman Gillies, who wrote on women's rights; and Caroline Ashurst Stansfeld, whose marriage to James Stansfeld was conducted by Fox.
Fox's position as a leading Unitarian minister was jeopardized in 1834 when he left his wife for one of his wards, and became an advocate of freer divorce. The Chapel's committee, led by Thomas Field Gibson's father Thomas Gibson, accepted Fox's resignation, which led to Fox's removal from the British Unitarian ministry and a secession of fifty families from the Chapel. He set up a new household in the Craven Hill area of Bayswater and re-established himself as a preacher of rationalism. Charles Hardwick grouped Fox with Theodore Parker and Robert William Mackay as proponents of "absolute religion". Fox's public presence became increasingly that of a commentator on social and political matters. The South Place chapel itself eventually lost its identification with Unitarianism, becoming the South Place Ethical Society.
Politician
As a supporter of the Anti-Corn-Law movement, Fox won celebrity as an impassioned orator and journalist, and from 1847 to 1862 he intermittently represented Oldham in Parliament as a Liberal.
Death
Fox died 3 June 1864, in London.
Works
He was editor of the Monthly Repository, and a frequent contributor to the Westminster Review, and published works on political and religious topics. An edition of his Works was edited by William Ballantyne Hodgson and Henry James Slack, and appeared from 1865.
Family
Fox was a friend of radical journalist Benjamin Flower. On Flower's death in 1829, his two daughters, Eliza Flower and Sarah Fuller Flower Adams, became Fox's wards. Fox separated from his wife Eliza nee Florance, a daughter of James Florance, in the 1830s, and, causing much scandal, apparently set up home with Eliza Flower and his children. One of Fox's daughters, also named Eliza, married Frederick Lee Bridell. Both were accomplished artists.